pushed Basil (who had risen at her entrance) before her towards the
door. "First you lead a girl on, and then you want to lead her further
still. I suppose it amuses you to see her tears. There's the door, now.
Off you go! We want your room, not your company. And what good can you
see in him?" she went on, turning to Masha. "Has not your uncle been
walking into you to-day already? No; she must stick to her promise,
forsooth! 'I will have no one but Basil,' Fool that you are!"
"Yes, I WILL have no one but him! I'll never love any one else! I could
kill myself for him!" poor Masha burst out, the tears suddenly gushing
forth.
For a while I stood watching her as she wiped away those tears. Then I
fell to contemplating Basil attentively, in the hope of finding out what
there was in him that she found so attractive; yet, though I sympathised
with her sincerely in her grief, I could not for the life of me
understand how such a charming creature as I considered her to be could
love a man like him.
"When I become a man," I thought to myself as I returned to my room,
"Petrovskoe shall be mine, and Basil and Masha my servants. Some day,
when I am sitting in my study and smoking a pipe, Masha will chance to
pass the door on her way to the kitchen with an iron, and I shall say,
'Masha, come here,' and she will enter, and there will be no one else in
the room. Then suddenly Basil too will enter, and, on seeing her, will
cry, 'My sweetheart is lost to me!' and Masha will begin to weep, Then
I shall say, 'Basil, I know that you love her, and that she loves you.
Here are a thousand roubles for you. Marry her, and may God grant you
both happiness!' Then I shall leave them together."
Among the countless thoughts and fancies which pass, without logic or
sequence, through the mind and the imagination, there are always some
which leave behind them a mark so profound that, without remembering
their exact subject, we can at least recall that something good has
passed through our brain, and try to retain and reproduce its effect.
Such was the mark left upon my consciousness by the idea of sacrificing
my feelings to Masha's happiness, seeing that she believed that she
could attain it only through a union with Basil.
XIX. BOYHOOD
PERHAPS people will scarcely believe me when I tell them what were the
dearest, most constant, objects of my reflections during my boyhood, so
little did those objects consort with my age and position. Yet, in my
opinion, contrast between a man's actual position and his moral activity
constitutes the most reliable sign of his genuineness.
During the period when I was leading a solitary and self-centred moral
life, I was much taken up with abstract thoughts on man's destiny, on
a future life, and on the immortality of the soul, and, with all the
ardour of inexperience, strove to make my youthful intellect solve those
questions--the questions which constitute the highest level of thought
to which the human intellect can tend, but a final decision of which the
human intellect can never succeed in attaining.
I believe the intellect to take the same course of development in the
individual as in the mass, as also that the thoughts which serve as
a basis for philosophical theories are an inseparable part of that
intellect, and that every man must be more or less conscious of those
thoughts before he can know anything of the existence of philosophical
theories. To my own mind those thoughts presented themselves with such
clarity and force that I tried to apply them to life, in the fond belief
that I was the first to have discovered such splendid and invaluable
truths.
Sometimes I would suppose that happiness depends, not upon external
causes themselves, but only upon our relation to them, and that,
provided a man can accustom himself to bearing suffering, he need
never be unhappy. To prove the latter hypothesis, I would (despite the
horrible pain) hold out a Tatistchev's dictionary at arm's length for
five minutes at a time, or else go into the store-room and scourge my
back with cords until the tears involuntarily came to my eyes!
Another time, suddenly bethinking me that death might find me at any
hour or any minute, I came to the conclusion that man could only be
happy by using the present to the full and taking no thought for the
future. Indeed, I wondered how people had never found that out before.
Acting under the influence of the new idea, I laid my lesson-books
aside for two or three days, and, reposing on my bed, gave myself up to
novel-reading and the eating of gingerbread-and-honey which I had bought
with my last remaining coins.
Again, standing one day before the blackboard and smearing figures on it
with honey, I was struck with the thought, "Why is symmetry so agreeable
to the eye? What is symmetry? Of course it is an innate sense," I
continued; "yet what is its basis? Perhaps everything in life is
symmetry? But no. On the contrary, this is life"--and I drew an oblong
figure on the board--"and after life the soul passes to eternity"--here
I drew a line from one end of the oblong figure to the edge of the
board. "Why should there not be a corresponding line on the other
side? If there be an eternity on one side, there must surely be a
corresponding one on the other? That means that we have existed in a
previous life, but have lost the recollection of it."
This conclusion--which seemed to me at the time both clear and novel,
but the arguments for which it would be difficult for me, at this
distance of time, to piece together--pleased me extremely, so I took a
piece of paper and tried to write it down. But at the first attempt
such a rush of other thoughts came whirling though my brain that I was
obliged to jump up and pace the room. At the window, my attention was
arrested by a driver harnessing a horse to a water-cart, and at once my
mind concentrated itself upon the decision of the question, "Into what
animal or human being will the spirit of that horse pass at death?" Just
at that moment, Woloda passed through the room, and smiled to see me
absorbed in speculative thoughts. His smile at once made me feel that
all that I had been thinking about was utter nonsense.
I have related all this as I recollect it in order to show the reader
the nature of my cogitations. No philosophical theory attracted me so
much as scepticism, which at one period brought me to a state of mind
verging upon insanity. I took the fancy into my head that no one nor
anything really existed in the world except myself--that objects were
not objects at all, but that images of them became manifest only so soon
as I turned my attention upon them, and vanished again directly that
I ceased to think about them. In short, this idea of mine (that real
objects do not exist, but only one's conception of them) brought me to
Schelling's well-known theory. There were moments when the influence
of this idea led me to such vagaries as, for instance, turning sharply
round, in the hope that by the suddenness of the movement I should come
in contact with the void which I believed to be existing where I myself
purported to be!
What a pitiful spring of moral activity is the human intellect! My
faulty reason could not define the impenetrable. Consequently it
shattered one fruitless conviction after another--convictions which,